The Wanderers by Meg Howrey

'Phenomenal. The Wanderers explores the dangers and necessities of venturing away from the familiar and finding home in the unknown. Howrey's expansive vision left me awestruck' - Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

‘The Wanderers is a wonderful exploration of space, trust, and what it means to be a conscious creature, finely-tuned and funny from the first page to the last. I loved getting lost in Meg Howrey's off-kilter world of astronauts and their simulated fantasies.’ - Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive

Station Eleven meets The Martian in this brilliantly inventive novel about three astronauts training for the first-ever mission to Mars, an experience that will push the boundary between real and unreal, test their relationships, and leave each of them—and their families—changed forever.

Scribner (Simon & Schuster) / 6 April 2017 / £12.99 / HB / Fiction

As they look to the stars, what are they missing back home?

In four years Prime Space will put the first humans on Mars. Helen Kane, Yoshi Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they’re the crew for the job by spending seventeen months in the most realistic simulation every created

Helen is an experienced astronaut with a NASA position and a struggling grown-up daughter who needs her but when, at the age of fifty-three, she is offered a place on the training programme for the first crewed mission to Mars, she cannot refuse a last chance to walk among the stars.

Her fellow astronauts are Sergei, a gruff Russian whose teenage sons are less mysterious to him than they’d like to think; and Yoshi, kind and focused, whose exhaustive carefulness has led him ever further from his wife.

The three will be enclosed for months in a tiny spacecraft, while outside their loved ones negotiate life on Earth. How far will the wanderers travel in the pursuit of endeavour, and what will it be like to come home?

The Wanderers is a brilliant, witty and sharply observed novel from an exciting new voice.

‘An expansive tale of the costs of human ambition, The Wanderers is unquestionably the work of a brilliant writer at the height of her powers.’

Meg Howrey is a novelist and a former professional dancer and actor. Her non-fiction writing has been published in Vogue, and she is the author of two previous novels Blind Sight and Cranes Dance. The Wanderers is her UK debut. She lives in Los Angeles.